1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for collecting data for exchanging E-mails between communication terminals, such as personal computers, over a communication network, and data for a storage medium for a data collection program.
2. Description of Related Art
As a configuration of utilizing the Internet for providing a global-scale communication network environment capable of exchanging the information between mutually spaced-apart computers, an electronic mail (E-mail) is in widespread use.
In an Internet E-mail system, mail servers are provided in a distributed fashion in each domain. The client user sends or receives an E-mail to or from a mail server of the domain to which he or she belongs.
That is, a sender states the contents he or she desires to send and accords a required address and name by a client tool for an E-mail termed a mailer (software for sending/receiving the mail) or a browser (perusal/retrieval software) for sending the address and the mail to the receiver.
The mail server of a domain to which the sender belongs sends the mail for transmission to a representative mail server of an organization. The representative mail server accords an address of the server/node to be arrived at to send the address to the network, which then refers to the address to sequentially transfer the mail to the mail server to which belongs the counterpart of communication (receiver).
The receiver recognizes the arrival of the E-mail in his or her post by various means such as display of a notice of arrival upon starting the mailer so that he or she can read the sent mail.
In order for the user having no experience in using the personal computer to be able to comprehend the mailer operating method intuitively, there has been proposed a method for sending and receiving the E-mail using an agent on his or her behalf, such as a pet like a rabbit or a tortoise. This displays the process of receiving and delivering the E-mail or the process of E-mail delivery from another user to permit intuitive comprehension of the act of mail delivery between users.
With the above-mentioned E-mail system, the agent parameters controlling the behavior of each pet is varied each time the user causes his or her own pet to send the E-mail such that the pet is improved in ability or lowered in physical power.
On the other hand, in keeping with the recent development of the Internet, the tendency is for enterprises to provide home pages for marketing, prize offering or recruiting of working staffs. These home pages also provide questionnaires as to marketed goods and accept entry for rewards and recruiting. An extremely large number of E-mails are received by applicants and a lot of man power is necessary to collect the mail contents to arrive at the results. These results cannot be acquired with ease even if the accepting format of the E-mails is unified for curtailing the man power.
In the E-mail sending/receiving system, it is contemplated to send pet agents of the user to a mail address introduced in a specified home page to make entries of the pets of the respective users and to collect the agent parameters sent until entry closure to set ranks of the slimness contest or scholastic examinations. However, it is difficult to collect the agent parameters of the pets to display the results in view of the enormous man power involved in the collection.